Analytic language

- updated 2018/03/13 20:30

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In linguistic typology, an analytic language is a language that primarily conveys relationships between words in sentences by way of helper words (particles, prepositions, etc.) and word order, as opposed to utilizing inflections (changing the form of a word to convey its role in the sentence). For example, in English the phrase "The cat chases the ball" conveys the fact that the cat is acting on the ball analytically via word order. This can be contrasted to synthetic languages that rely heavily on inflections to convey word relationships (e.g. the phrases "The cat chases the ball" and "The cat chased the ball" convey different time frames via changing the form of the word chase). Most languages are not purely analytic but many rely primarily on analytic syntax.

Isolating language

A related concept is the isolating language, which is about a low number of any type of morphemes per word, taking into account derivational morphemes as well. A purely isolating language would be analytic by necessity, lacking inflectional morphemes by definition. However, the reverse is not necessarily true: a language can have derivational morphemes while lacking inflectional morphemes. For example, Mandarin Chinese has many compound words,[2] giving it a moderately high ratio of morphemes per word, yet, since it has almost no inflectional affixes at all to convey grammatical relationships, it is a very analytic language.

English is not totally analytic in its nouns as it does use inflections for number (e.g. "one day, three days; one boy, four boys") and possession ("The boy's ball" vs. "The boy has a ball"). Mandarin Chinese has, in contrast, no inflections on its nouns: compare 一天yī tiān "one day", 三天sān tiān "three days" (literally "three day"); 一个男孩yī ge nánhái "one boy" (lit. "one [entity of] male child"), 四个男孩sì ge nánhái "four boys" (lit. "four [entity of] male child"). Instead, English is considered to be weakly inflected.